1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system performance prediction mechanism based on performance measurements of software components, and more particularly to a system performance prediction mechanism based on performance measurements of software components in a system that combines a plurality of software components.
2. Related Background Art
In a first conventional system construction, a desk study of performance is conducted in the early stage of designing or performance measurement of a prototype system is conducted in some cases, whereas performance is rarely evaluated by measuring a system under development. In most cases, a performance evaluation of a development system is performed for the first time in a joint test phase when the entire system starts to operate (for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-108656 (pp. 8 to 10, See FIG. 1)).
In a second conventional performance evaluation (prediction) methodology in a system construction, there has been disclosed a method of dividing software execution to be able to estimate a system resource utilization necessary for executing a program before predicting a system performance based on system resource utilization estimated for individual processing steps (for example, refer to the technical literature, “Connie U. Smith, Software Performance Engineering, pp. 157-224, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.”).
In the first conventional technology, the performance of the development system is evaluated for the first time in the joint test phase when the entire system starts to operate. Therefore, if a performance problem is found at that time, it is impossible to take large-scale countermeasures such as a change of a basic architecture of a system since the time for countermeasures is limited, thereby causing a problem that the countermeasures are limited to superficial ones having only poor effects. Therefore, in some cases, the performance cannot be improved enough, by which it causes such a situation as missing the time of delivery or a situation that a system integration vender copes with the problem by enhancing the hardware without compensation.
Furthermore, in the second conventional technology above, a software developer estimates a system performance for each processing step, thereby causing a problem that the performance cannot be measured systematically.